Mac slow

I've got a 2.1Ghz MB w/1GB of Ram. Without running anything, its at approx 39 degrees and when I look at the monitor on my dashboard it says I've got like 188MB free of ram, with the graph at about half way up. I look at the activity monitor and I can't really find anything thats making it run slow. I had the backgrounds changing every 5 minutes but I turned that off incase that was the problem, but I dont think so. Right now, with System prefrences open and firefox, I'm running at 44 degrees and using almost 400mb of my RAM.

Whats wrong??

PS: Also, my taskbar disappears if I'm not using a program.. can I change that?

I'm not sure about your system resources issue, someone a little more knowledgeable will have to answer that for you, sorry.

I can help you (I hope) with your "taskbar" query though. Are you are referring to the Dock running along the bottom of the screen with all your applications stored in it? If so, you can turn of "hiding" so that it will always be present on the screen even if you don't have your cursor hovering over it. Go to "System Preferences" and then click on the "Dock" icon under the "Personal" section, which should be running along the top. In there, at the bottom, will be an option called "Automatically hide and show the Dock" that you simply uncheck and that should sort everything out for you.

I hope this helps.

Open Activity Monitor and set it to show just the Active Processes.
That will show you what is using how much Plus lots of other information.

Showing the CPU usage dock icon for Activity Monitor is a good idea
I would rather trust that than a Dashboard widget.

Console app in Utilities is the next option ~ check to see what is being written to the log. Maybe some PPC App that will not work well in Rosetta is causing a problem.

The Disappearing Taskbar? Dock or Menu bar?

Menu Bar

Thanks for the help guys

1GB of ram is low, I would recommend 2 or even 4.

I recently tried to shut off the computer in order to put it in my incase and lend it to a friend. I pressed the apple symbol (after opening up Finder since the taskbar dissappeared) and pressed shut off. The taskbar/menubar then disappeared as normal, but thats all that happened. I left it for ~5 mins and nothing happened. I then repeated the process and when I press shut down it says finder had a problem and could not shut down.

I'm really starting to think I have some sort of virus...

Forget the Virus if you are not running windows.

Back up everything, Repeat Backup Everything ~ check out the info on Archive and install keeping your settings.
Grab your discs and reinstall OSX ~

Info via. Finder > Help > Type in > Reinstalling Mac OSX.

Some would suggest Repairing permissions / Repairing the Disc via Disc Utility but by the sound of it you are well past that point.
All the Best.

I don't have another hard drive to back up.

In all my years on PC I've never ever needed to reinstall the OS. I'm not happy, at all, with this.

Andy348 said:

I don't have another hard drive to back up.

In all my years on PC I've never ever needed to reinstall the OS. I'm not happy, at all, with this.

Click to expand...

Lucky you, I had to reformat my Windows boxes at least once a year.

Use DVDs & CDs if you have nothing else. Backup all your user folders ~ All the ones under the house icon in Finder.

Archive & Install keeping settings is a very simple job and if it is enough to fix the problems you wont need the backups. If you have to erase and install then you will need them.

Running any computer without recent backups is just asking for trouble. Hard Drives die, just a fact of life.

You asked for advice, if you don't agree take it into Apple and let them check it out. They will also expect you to have a complete backup.

So I will backup all my downloaded movies from torrents onto my PC and write down all the new applications I have.

I'll schedule an appointement with the Genius Bar in Florida, bring my order form and a peice of paper explaining all my problems. I'll tell them all about it, they'll probably want to check out the computer and then hopefully I'll get a new one.

To clarify my slow speed, I took pics of my dashboard Activething icon along with pictures of my Activity monitor. Nothing is running and its at 47 degrees.

Oh and another thing I noticed.. in almost all of my files, I've got a .db file (what is that?) that is called Thumbs... I try to get rid of it but it is still in all of my folders.

Reinstalling the operating system is a little premature in my opinion. In general, UNIX-based OSes don't ever need to be reinstalled, especially not as a troubleshooting measure.

It sounds like you've installed a piece of software that isn't playing nicely with your system. The first step in troubleshooting is to ask "what changed?". If you've installed any new software recently, remove it and see if there's any difference. Open Activity Monitor and sort the process list by CPU utilization. If something in particular is pegging the CPU, see if you can identify the process and end it.

If it just came out of the blue and nothing changed, I would see if there's a hardware problem (like a bad hard drive - it happens, particularly in notebooks). You can do so by running the Apple Hardware Test.

I don't understand by 'it's running slow'. How/why/when is it slow? What programs do you have open?

Ignore the widget - the temperature changes are a red herring.

Read up on Activity Monitor and buy another gig of RAM: Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

In the meantime, use Onyx to run optimisation on OS X. And do a full disk repair by booting up from your OS X CD.

I would recommend upgrading your ram.

What you guys don't understand is that it was running a lot faster before this, and when on idle, the RAM was barely being used. Now, check out the pics that I posted before. It uses a lot.

About removing all the programs, I've recently installed many new things. What I will do is back up all my stuff on an 8gb usb (mostly movies) then reinstall the OS. If that doesn't work, I'm going to Apple.

Andy348 said:

What you guys don't understand is that it was running a lot faster before this, and when on idle, the RAM was barely being used. Now, check out the pics that I posted before. It uses a lot.

About removing all the programs, I've recently installed many new things. What I will do is back up all my stuff on an 8gb usb (mostly movies) then reinstall the OS. If that doesn't work, I'm going to Apple.

Click to expand...

There are a lot of things you need to check before you reinstall the OS. Again, that is almost ALWAYS not necessary and should only be used as a last resort.

One of the easiest things you can try would be to create a second user account. Then, log into it and see if the problem persists. If not, it has nothing to do with the OS and is related to something that is auto-starting when your normal account is logged in. You should be able to easily tell what it is just by checking login items under the Accounts Preference Pane.

BTW, was Limewire installed recently?

cwa107 said:

BTW, was Limewire installed recently?

Click to expand...

Fairly recently, yes.

torchy said:

Some would suggest Repairing permissions / Repairing the Disc via Disc Utility but by the sound of it you are well past that point.

Click to expand...

This is amongst the first things to try. Reinstalling the OS is the very last resort.

Guess what?

After getting extremely frustrated and ready to throw this computer out of the window, I finally just ran it under water. Screw it.

LOL JKS.

Anyway, I ran an anti virus software and I had a virus (trojan). Basically, its all fixed except for the hardware problems.

Just out of curiosity, which trojan was it?

Also, a note of advice. As you travel on the web, if you're ever prompted to install a plug-in, make sure you understand exactly what it is, that you trust the source it's coming from and why it's needed. If you're prompted to enter your password, be especially wary. Although there still are no viruses for OS X (and a trojan is not a virus), there are a few trojans - but they can be easily avoided just by being judicious about what you're installing.